


The Construction of Kady

by Rizandace



Series: Immortality AU [7]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, M/M, Multi, The Old Guard AU, references to historically accurate homophobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 22:14:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29599512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rizandace/pseuds/Rizandace
Summary: Short snippets on the theme of Kady: her origins, her relationships with her family, her many adventures. Set in the universe ofA Comet Pulled From Orbit, contains major spoilers for that story.
Relationships: Kady Orloff-Diaz/Alice Quinn, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh, William "Penny" Adiyodi/Kady Orloff-Diaz, William "Penny" Adiyodi/Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Series: Immortality AU [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2105883
Comments: 30
Kudos: 23





	1. On Appearances

The dust took a couple of weeks to settle, after Kady’s abrupt departure from her old life and chaotic intrusion into her new one. She’d been in the middle of war with her own people when she’d died for the first time, and the others had found her desperately attempting to steal magic from a rival hedge group in order to survive, too anxious about her own life to properly mourn for her mother’s death, and certainly too caught up in her own frantic mind to trust any of these new people, much less _believe_ them about their immortality, or her own.

But eventually she did grow to know them a bit. It didn’t mean she was ready to completely cut off the plans she’d had for herself, the path she’d expected her life to take, but it got to the point where she could sleep in a room down the hall from Penny Adiyodi and the others, and not feel like she needed to keep her guard up all night. These people were strange, and definitely dangerous, but she’d come to believe, foolishly or not, that they didn’t mean her harm.

Margo, with an authoritative finality that Kady appreciated when she herself felt so aimless, had ordered them all to run to ground and get some rest after the tumult of the past couple of weeks. They’d arrived via Penny’s Traveling to a well-furnished and magically enlarged home somewhere in the French countryside, and while Kady felt a certain amount of curiosity to explore a country entirely unfamiliar to her, she also didn’t mind following Margo’s instructions to lay low and get some rest before striking out on a sight-seeing tour.

So that was where she was, huddled under blankets in a room of her own, a fire damped in the grate across the way, lanterns still lit despite the late hour. She wanted to be asleep, but she found she couldn’t quite get her brain to go quiet. It was like now, after everything, she finally had a chance to _think_ about all that had happened to her, and it was too much to hope to silence the thoughts with the expediency of unconsciousness.

She’d been reading a book earlier in the day, and decided to go fetch it from the drawing room, see if the words of Sir Walter Scott could send her into the land of dreams. On her way down the hall and past the entrance to the dining room, she heard a quiet murmur of voices. Her instinct was to freeze and back away, but she ignored it and kept going forward. She had no reason to feel uncertain of her place here. If anything, she was doing them a favor by staying where they’d told her to stay, instead of running away from the insanity they all represented.

It was Eliot and Quentin, standing just in the doorway, and as Kady walked by, she saw that Eliot’s hand was curved against the line of Quentin’s jaw, their heads tilted together in intimacy.

Now she was rethinking her boldness, but it was too late to turn back. Quentin heard the creak of a floorboard and spun to identify the intruder. His posture went tense as if to attack or defend, but then he softened when he saw her. Eliot’s reaction was a beat slower than Quentin’s, but when he saw that it was Kady who had come across them here in the dark, he didn’t relax. In fact, he pinned her with a look, almost a glare, sharp enough that for a moment Kady was rendered speechless.

Then, it occurred to her that the look was a silent question, and a warning, rolled all into one. She nearly laughed, despite her shock at finding them this way. “Oh, you don’t need to worry,” she told them, trying for a smile. “Um. Not on my account, anyway.”

“We weren’t worried,” Quentin said, matter-of-fact.

“I didn’t know,” Kady said, and then wished she hadn’t.

“No,” Eliot said. “There are those who would make trouble.”

“I’m not like that,” Kady said, and then, in an effort to explain, because for some reason the idea of being judged unfavorably by these two men was unbearable, she rushed on. “I’d have to be a hypocrite.”

At this, Eliot finally _did_ soften, raising a curious eyebrow. “Why, Miss Diaz. I had no idea.”

“It’s not like Margo and Julia bothered to hide that they’re sharing a bed,” Kady blurted. “I’d hate to think you felt deception necessary on my account.”

The two shared a look, and she’d seen them communicate silently this way before, but she’d never noticed the love behind it until now. They were good at hiding what they were to each other, and the thought made Kady terribly sad.

“The deception was more for the world in general,” Quentin finally said, and he shifted a bit so he was leaning against the broad expanse of Eliot’s chest. Eliot hooked an arm around his waist, a gesture so automatic she was sure they’d been standing this way for years. Or. Or for _centuries_. How long had they… “Sometimes it’s easier to keep up certain appearances. Let people think whatever they want. It’s often not wise to add unnecessary fuel to an already high-tension situation.”

Kady swallowed, thinking of the discretion she herself had used on those rare instances when she allowed herself the luxury of a dalliance. Male or female, any partner she chose would cause some measure of scandal, even the relatively uninhibited underground world of New York hedges.

“Well,” Kady said. “You’re home now. With people you can trust.”

She hoped they understood she wanted to be included in that rarefied group of trusted confidants. Eliot smiled at her, surprising in its warmth after the guardedness of his expression when she’d first stumbled upon them. “To be clear,” he said, affecting nonchalance but still smiling at her, “sometimes we don’t bother with discretion, and we just kill anyone who gives us grief.”

Quentin was smiling too, but she couldn’t quite tell if it was in response to a joke, or was meant to be silent confirmation of Eliot’s words.

“Um,” Kady said, thinking of the carnage of the past several days, and wondering what these two would be capable of when they didn’t bother to hold back. “Well, I guess I’m glad we’re on the same side.”

She fetched her book, and on her way back up the stairs she saw Quentin and Eliot sharing a kiss, something chaste and familiar, still in the doorway where she’d found them. It wasn’t a performance strictly for her sake, but she couldn’t help but think they’d timed it so she’d see. So she’d know they’d be themselves around her from this point forward.

When she found her way back to her own room, she discovered she was ready for sleep at last.


	2. On Brooklyn, NY

Kady was born in the year 1799, in the home of a hedge witch. A clean one, well situated, surrounded by people who knew medicine and magic. Her father in the next room, his friends waiting with him for news of the delivery. All very quaint, when she thinks back on it now. She’d been born, quite literally, into a ready-made community. New York hedges, most of them Jewish like her parents, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants. Right there on the verge of a new century, the whole wide future available to her from the jump.

She’d been a happy kid, mostly because she hadn’t known any better. Isolated from the world at large, her Brooklyn had been the Brooklyn of magicians only, and while prejudices and cruelty could seep into even the most protected of spaces, for the most part she never had to worry about who she was and what it meant to the world at large. She could grow up _strong_ , surrounded by people who viewed magic as the first measure of a person’s worth, instead of their gender or their origins or anything else about them.

She knew the streets, the pathways between her home and the homes of everyone else in their hedge network. The quickest route between her own front door and the meeting lodges where dozens of witches gathered together for important announcements or ceremonial purposes. Her education was a thing of malleable, ever-chaotic splendor, one kindly old man teaching her fire magic while her parents weren’t watching, then strict, bookish instruction in various languages from her father, then adventures with her mother, flying from place to place to find something new to learn.

When she grew older, her Brooklyn was a place of laughter and mischief, where she could find a pretty girl and show her the best place to be alone, or look at a childhood friend with new eyes when he hit a growth spurt, becoming a man who she could allow to touch her. It was the place she tasted forbidden fruits and refined dangerous skills to a razor’s edge, wielding violence with the grace of a dancer.

The Orloff and Diaz families had connections, relations, in every corner of the neighborhood. Centuries later, Kady can still hold the map of the area in her head by remembering which family lived on which street, how to bounce from her mother’s cousins in Borough Park all the way over to one of her best friends in what was now called Prospect Heights.

Looking back over the span of centuries, Kady now knows that she’d been born at the start of some things, and the endings of others. Her Brooklyn had been on the cusp of true urbanization, the site of Revolutionary fervor scant decades before her birth, the nascent home of what would become a true hub of every type of power imaginable: political, economic, magical, cultural. She had been born before it had exploded into all of that, but the signs had already been there. New York had grown up with her. It had been her sister, a part of her family just as much as the extended network of cousins and aunts and uncles making up the various hedge affiliate groups in the burgeoning magical underground. She’d never been quite sure which ones were truly blood relatives, but that hadn’t mattered.

Brooklyn, New York was where she became a person and a hedge witch, where she cut her teeth on magic and where she figured out what mattered most to her, which battles to fight to the death, and which she could let go. It was a home that would always be there for her, even when she resented it for that.

But upstate? Looming like a premonition of all that was to come? The newly established Brakebills University for Magical Pedagogy.

B is for Brooklyn, B is for Brakebills. It’s another story, another chapter of Kady’s young life, but it all blends together with the cruel passage of time. Before Brakebills, Brooklyn was a sanctuary. After Brakebills, it became a reminder of all that could go wrong.

Now, her relationship with the haunts of her childhood is rather complicated. Tragedy strikes, and Kady is cut adrift, no longer entwined with a community that protected and shaped her from the moment of her birth. She will always be a New York hedge, a Brooklyn hedge, some part of her will always think _ah, I’m home_ when she walks down a certain street or notices a landmark familiar from her own time. But it’s not a warm embrace, these homecomings. It’s all laced with trepidation, with uncertainty about the kind of welcome she might expect. Hell, the last time she’d spent any real time in New York, Marina Andrieski had decided to kidnap and torture her and all of her friends. It only made sense that she’d be skittish about the city now.

But it’s the place she met everyone who matters to her. Now, and then. She was born to a family, started her life thinking these people were the ones she would spend it with. And then scant decades later she met a new family, created bonds with them that surpassed blood-ties and ethnicities and countries of origin a thousand times over.

New York will forever be the place her mother died right in front of her. The place she was forced to say a final goodbye to her father, fading into the mists of memory before he could start to wonder why she never looked any older. It was the place she’d been forced to run from on more than one occasion, when her reputation began to catch up to her.

And it was the place she met Penny Adiyodi, in a warehouse, scared for her life. The place she met Alice Quinn, in a study room on Brakebills campus, a place she swore she’d never go again unless it was for the purposes of burning it to the ground.

Kady carries it with her, a version of this place that grows and changes and yet is somehow at its core the very same. It twists itself up and takes a beating from the outside in, and the inside out, but the inexorable march of time sweeps it along just like everything else. It was Brooklyn then and it’s Brooklyn now. She’s lucky, to be able to point a finger on a map, to walk down streets, place a hand against a wall and know the bones still remain. It’s more than many of the others can say. Sometimes, she wishes she could erase herself from this place, and erase its influence from her, but she knows she’d miss it if it were gone, if only the faded records of history, the crumbled remains left behind for scientists to study, could attest to its ever having existed in the first place.

If she lives as long as the oldest members of her family, someday she’ll get to know what that feels like. But for now, she’ll remember to appreciate what she still has.


	3. On Courtship

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Penny is dashing as fuck, change my mind. <3

She’d been resistant at first, to the whole enterprise. Not Penny, not the way she felt for him. That, she’d more or less decided to let happen from the jump. There was no fighting against it.

But… the _romance_.

She wasn’t sure how she felt about the fact that Penny Adiyodi, who most of the time marched through the world with pragmatism to the point of brusqueness, who said what he really thought and did whatever he wanted to do, was also… deeply, irrepressibly… _sweet_.

He’d bring her flowers, and offer her his arm when they were out in public. He’d compliment her clothing and pull her chair out for her during meals. And during their very first date, the first real moments of alone togetherness they’d ever shared… he made her dinner, and they ate it in the warm glow of candlelight, artfully arranged around a small dining table set for two.

(The year was 1826. Electricity had not been an option. But that was hardly the point.)

She’d already fallen a little bit in love with all of them by this point, still flailing in confusion and worry over the loss of her old life, still adjusting to the realities of the new. But they’d all been kind to her, welcoming, and they were all _beautiful,_ and clever, and intense, and had so much to teach her, so much to offer.

Penny stood out from the others, mostly by virtue of the attention he paid her. While all of them had worked to make Kady comfortable, Penny was the one who asked after her every morning, inquiring after her sleep, asking if she needed anything. Better than that: bringing her things she needed before she’d even said she needed them, to the point where at first she’d doubted the strength of her mental shields.

Penny had seemed affronted at the suggestion that he might be taking a peak at her thoughts. “I pay attention, that’s all.”

And that _was_ all. It was why their first evening together had gone so well. Penny had paid attention to the foods she liked, to the places she said she wanted to go. He’d taken her to the seaside in Italy, a place she’d never been but had wondered about. He did music magic to fill the room with intimate sounds, and adjusted the spell until he found what she loved best. He paid _attention_ to her, and got it all right, without fanfare. The only thing she didn’t understand was…

“Why?” she asked, over dessert. “Not that I’m not deeply impressed and gratified, but why… are you taking an interest?”

Penny cocked his head at her. “You’re worried I have unscrupulous aims? Because I do, but I’d be happy to conceal them from you for the time being.”

“I don’t really have scruples in that area,” Kady admitted, annoyingly charmed by his determination to dismiss societal prudishness while still showing her the deepest personal respect. He walked such tightropes with ease, and it left her off-balance. “I meant, you have the others. You don’t really know me yet.” It had been a year, but she’d already started thinking in terms of centuries. Time stretched in front of them, unthinkable in its unending march. She hadn’t been around long enough to matter.

“I’d like to know you,” Penny said, with a frown. “And I’d like to think I already do, at least a little. I suspect I’d hardly be very original if I told you I thought you were beautiful, but that’s definitely the truth.”

She didn’t want it to be working on her, but it was. “Margo and Julia are beautiful.”

“Yes they are,” Penny agreed easily.

“But I suppose they’re also spoken for.”

Penny froze, then took a small sip of wine and set the glass down. “So that’s it, then. You’re worried I’m interested because I’m the odd man out.”

“Well,” Kady said, looking behind her in trepidation even though she knew they were alone, in this private residence Penny had procured for the evening. “It can’t have been pleasant, being alone, without a lover, around such…” she trailed off, unsure how to finish. Margo and Julia. Quentin and Eliot. They were beautiful together, but also difficult to comprehend.

“It’s been more than pleasant,” Penny said, contradicting her at once. “I don’t want to shock you, but I haven’t exactly been without companionship from those I love most in this world.”

Kady wasn’t blind. She’d been with them in close quarters for months now, getting to know the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of their relationships. Still, she’d never quite been sure, or known how to ask. “Julia?” she ventured a guess.

Penny shrugged. “Yes, sometimes.”

Kady swallowed before trying again. “...Eliot?”

“Considerably more often.”

“With Quentin too.” That wasn’t a question.

Penny nodded. “You said you’d… with women and men before, yes?”

Kady took a gulp of her own wine, trying to understand how the conversation had gotten here. “You haven’t scared me away, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“Delighted to hear it.” Penny gave her a look, appraising, confident yet not overly so. “The point is that I’m not here, with you, alone, simply out of loneliness.”

“So then I repeat my question: why?”

“I think you’re interesting,” Penny said, with a little shrug.

Kady let out a laugh, refusing to be embarrassed. “You’re three hundred years old. I’ve got to be one of the least interesting things about your life at this point.”

“Quite the opposite,” Penny said.

She wasn’t going to ask _why_ again. She had her pride. Penny saw it on her face anyway.

“I don’t know, Kady,” he said. “Do you find _me_ interesting? Beyond the immortality, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“Can you list the reasons why?”

She could, maybe. At least some of them. She’d never been shy, but the prospect was a tad embarrassing.

“I take your point.”

“You were running for your life when I met you, and you reacted with healthy skepticism to the arrival of a merry band of magicians conveniently arriving to help you escape, but after that… you took it all in stride. Everything you’ve learned, everything we’ve all told you. You’ve handled the truth a lot better than I did, that’s for sure.”

“But that’s not…” Kady trailed off. “I’ve been terrified.”

“Yes, I know. But you’re ready for it all anyway. Despite the fear.”

“You like me because I’m _brave_ ,” Kady said, huffing in disbelief.

“And beautiful. And open-minded. I’ve just told you I semi-regularly share a bed with two other men and you’re still sitting here enjoying the meal.”

“I am enjoying the meal,” Kady said. “Thank you for bringing me here.”

“See, that,” Penny said, grinning again and shoving up from the table, coming around to help her to her feet. “That’s what I like about you.”

“What?” she said, as she was pulled forward into Penny’s arms. She was pleasantly aware that she was about to be quite thoroughly kissed.

“You take the world as it is, and you find a way to appreciate whatever you find there. I have a feeling you’ll extend me the same courtesy.”


End file.
